Summer: Time to Step Outside the Cycle
Five Insights for More Strategic Enrollment Management
Are you tired of spinning in the enrollment cycle? Here’s one remedy. Make time this summer to step outside the cycle, ask some tough questions about your approach to enrollment management, and consider new, more strategic ways of working.
This may be the only time of the year when you really have an opportunity to assess the successes and failures of previous cycles. The pace of the year is otherwise so demanding that college officials are often unable to consider, evaluate, and modify their practices in a more thoughtful, multi-year context.
Focusing on this year’s “summer melt” and incoming-class yield is an essential part of the business, of course. Collecting feedback from your admitted students – both those enrolling and those not enrolling – is important, too. However, it’s essential to rise above exclusive focus on operational routines this time of year to ask insightful questions about what you are trying to do, how you are doing it, how you can do better, and where you can learn more.
Here’s a good case in point. Standard practice can mean poring over the results of a survey of your admitted students to understand why they ultimately accept or decline your offer of admission. There certainly is plenty to learn from this process. Yet your admitted student pool is very small in relative terms. By that point in the process, you may have already missed the majority of opportunities found in the inquiry pool, which is likely to be ten or more times larger than your acceptance pool. The best enrollment management practices, therefore, invest significant time and effort closer to the top of the admissions funnel to understand who is applying, who’s not applying, and why. This is particularly important as institutions try to diversify their student mix. Focusing on accepted students who decide not to enroll risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy in which you communicate with prospective students and parents in your own image. What about the 90 percent who never apply?
An Organic Approach
Curiosity and honesty are central to the success of this kind of organic effort. Ask why you continue to spend money on enrollment practices you suspect to be of minimal value moving forward. Be proud of what you do well, document these activities, and train your teams in their continued effective execution. However, you will create a healthier, organic organization if you take the risk of eliminating less effective practices.
We have noticed a tendency among schools to keep adding to their admissions or financial aid practices instead of pruning back. These “piling on” habits generally consume money and time that might be better invested elsewhere, not to mention the strain on overworked employees and the costs of staff burnout and high turnover. Unexamined practices also drive up opportunity costs by stifling more productive ways to approach the market.
Ask yourself what isn’t working well enough to advance your goals. Think of all the new ideas you have not implemented because you are spending too much time and money on marginal activities. If you’re a president, engage your chief enrollment officer in this kind of creative, “blank slate” conversation. If you’re a chief enrollment officer, schedule an hour or two with your president over the summer to consider substantive cost-benefit tradeoffs. Use this time of year, as well, to engage your front-line staff in this kind of conversation by asking them what substantive changes they would make to existing practices and how they would implement them.
Five Strategic Insights
We have watched the evolution of enrollment management for nearly three decades. In fact, our founder and Chairman, Jack Maguire, was involved in creating the concept and coining the term when he was a Dean at Boston College. Drawing on his wisdom and experience, we offer five strategic insights that can help you embrace enrollment management with greater success:
- Enrollment management is not simply a new name for Admissions. It is a data-driven, systems approach that integrates admissions, retention, student services, financial aid, pricing and marketing to improve applicant pools, class size, diversity, student satisfaction, retention rates and revenue. Enrollment management is holistic by nature and requires a multi-year perspective to help overcome the repetitive pitfalls of the annual cycle.
- Research informs better decision-making. Research that is well done can deliver deep understanding of your recruiting targets, their motivations, interests and influencers. What do you know about your current and admitted students? More important, perhaps, what do you know – really know – about your inquiry pool? Effective enrollment management means understanding why many of these students lose or never fully develop interest in your school, what other schools they consider, what motivates them, and why.
- Branding makes your research actionable. It puts your results to work. Translate your top-of-the-funnel research into messaging directed to a broader yet captive audience. Produce marketing materials that speak powerfully to the most attractive segments of your large, untapped inquiry pool and that differentiate you from the competition. Communicate with new, more diverse demographic and geographic constituencies in a manner that is welcoming and authentic. Frame your language as brand promises or prescriptions rather than mere descriptions of your brand attributes. Remember, it’s all about the student!
- Modeling helps you understand the inter-dynamics of price, enrollment, discount rate, and revenue. Strategic modeling also provides tools for integrating financial goals with enrollment outcomes such as quality, diversity, geography, and academic interests. Understanding and anticipating underlying causality and probable trade-offs, and developing a customized approach for optimizing outcomes of greatest value to you, will help you build sustainable institutional achievements. For example, advancing a strategic goal to increase class quality or diversity requires understanding complex relationships between tuition levels and financial aid, especially where new and less familiar demographics are involved. When modeling is done well, various hypothetical decisions can be studied and their probable outcomes understood well before taking action.
- Measurement asks, “What does success look like?” Best-practice colleges and universities are using dashboard reports to track progress of key enrollment-management measures on a real-time basis while also identifying patterns, problems and opportunities early. These user-friendly tools display and share performance metrics, such as enrollment size or diversity in simple, comprehensible and visually appealing ways. Over time, dashboards provide a meaningful narrative of your results and how you achieved them. Dashboards are also useful for performance planning and management. They provide a framework for presidents and chief enrollment officers to collaborate more strategically and systematically, especially when the underlying enrollment-management and institutional-performance metrics are jointly developed.
An organic approach to enrollment management that is informed by reliable data and monitored by performance-based dashboards will make it possible to create time and space for new ideas and investments in your areas of greatest success. Ask your staff to contemplate eliminating, say, 15 percent of their initiatives every year in favor of new ones. Encourage careful examination and risk taking. Value the lessons learned from failures as well as successes. And enjoy the fruits of your summer’s labor.